Luck of the Draw
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Template:Infobox Sliders episodes "Luck of the Draw" is the final episode of the first season of the science fiction television series Sliders. Quinn Mallory, Wade Wells, Maximillian Arturo, and Rembrandt Brown arrive in an alternate Earth where citizens are encouraged to play a lottery used as population control.
Joycelyn Elders is President of the United States in this Earth where San Francisco, populated by only 100,000 people in a world of half a billion, seems to Wade to be a utopia. "The Lottery" is played by using ATM-like kiosks that provide citizens with whatever money they ask for. Each dollar constitutes an entry for the grand prize drawing of five million dollars and a white card that gives its user unlimited buying privileges within the society.
When Wade's announced on TV that night as having won "The Lottery", she believes she and her friends will never have to worry about money again. However, during the Lottery Ball which she and the others attend, Quinn learns from a brochure produced by "Right to Lifers" about the measures this society has taken to prevent a Malthusian catastrophe. The winners of "The Lottery" are forced to take part in state-sponsored euthanasia and "make way" -- this world's euphemism for death -- while their beneficiaries get their prize money. According to the "Right to Lifers" (comprised of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, philosophers, and ministers), fifty thousand people have already died this way.
Rembrandt attempts to save one of the winners, a woman named Juliette, and take her with them on the next slide. However, Juliette has Rembrandt arrested by the Lottery Police, the enforcers of "The Lottery," and taken to be mercilessly killed at a municipal enforcement center. Wade and another lottery winner, Ryan, get ready to escape on the next slide. Quinn and Arturo, with help from the "Right to Lifers," free Rembrandt from the police van and join Wade in the ballroom where the Lottery Ball was held. Ryan, Wade, Rembrandt, Arturo, Quinn, and a dog named Henry reach another Earth. Quinn, who was the last one through, was grazed in the back of the head by a bullet from the Lottery Police, and falls unconscious.